NCW criticizes Reuter's poll ranking Cairo "most dangerous" for women

CAIRO – 27 October 2017: The National Council for Women (NCW) described Thomson Reuters Foundation’s poll that ranked Cairo “the most dangerous megacity for women in 2017" as unacceptable and unjustified.

The annual poll, conducted by Thomson Reuters's philanthropic arm, ranked the world's megacities according to the safest for women; it designated 31 cities in 19 countries as "megacities", defined as those cities with a population exceeding 10 million people. The poll was conducted only in the largest megacity in each country.

NCW said, in a report, that it is fully consciousness of the challenges that face Egyptian women, some of which include the four areas covered in the said poll, and that it is addressing those challenges through serious work based upon documented indicators, statistics and studies, and not only perception polls.

The council also criticized how the methodology of the poll is based on measuring perceptions of respondents, the poll itself is reported without mentioning the value or score assigned to each city, and how the process of publishing the poll is not transparent enough as the readers have no access to the actual summary results or the raw data.

Reuters' poll was also condemned by NCW as takes into account rational criteria, based on official and documented statistics—whether national and international— and serious studies on the status of women, according to the report.

"Such sensible perspectives stand in clear contrast to the approach adopted in the poll where results were based the impressions of a minimum of experts in each country," NCW added. " The poll did not reveal its criteria for selecting those so-called “experts,” except that they are focused on women’s issues and categorized under 5 groups, including academics, non-government organization workers, healthcare staff, policy-makers, and social commentators."
Here is the full NCW report: